Have you ever considered gating your content to get leads? Whether you choose to have open-access content or gate it to gather information, there are benefits and drawbacks you should be aware of. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand weighs the pros and cons of each approach and shares some tips for improving your process, regardless of whichever route you go.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about content gating.
This is something that a lot of content marketers use, particularly those who are interested in generating leads, individuals that their salespeople or sales teams or outreach folks or business development folks can reach out to specifically to sell a product or start a conversation. Many content marketers and SEOs use this type of content as a lure to essentially attract someone, who then fills in form fields to give enough information so that the sales pipeline gets filled or the leads pipeline gets filled, and then the person gets the content.
As opposed to the classic model that we're used to in a more open content marketing and open SEO world of, "Let me give you something and then hopefully get something in return," it's, "You give me something and I will give you this thing in return." This is a very, very popular tactic. You might be familiar with Moz and know that my general bias and Moz's general bias is against content gating. We sort of have a philosophical bias against it, with the exception of, on the Moz Local side, some enterprise stuff, that that marketing team may be doing, may in the future include some gating. But generally, at Moz, we're sort of against it.
However, I don't want to be too biased. I recognize that it does have benefits, and I want to explain some of those benefits and drawbacks so that you can make your own choices of how to do it. Then we're going to rock through some recommendations, some tactical tips that I've got for you around how you can improve how you do it, no matter whether you are doing open content or full content gating.
Benefits of gating content
The two. This is the gated idea. So you get this free report on the state of artificial intelligence in 2016. But first, before you get that report, you fill in all these fields: name, email, role, company website, Twitter, LinkedIn, what is your budget for AI in 2017 and you fill in a number. I'm not kidding here. Many of these reports require these and many other fields to be filled in. I have filled in personally several that are intense in order to get a report back. So it's even worked on me at times.
The opposite of that, of course, would be the report is completely available. You get to the webpage, and it's just here's the state of AI, the different sections, and you get your graphs and your charts, and all your data is right in there. Fantastic, completely free access. You've had to give nothing, just visit the website.
The benefits of gating are you actually get:
- More information about who specifically accessed the report. Granted, some of this information could be faked. There are people who work around that by verifying and validating at least the email address or those kinds of things.
- Those who expend the energy to invest in the report may view the data or the report itself as more valuable, more useful, more trustworthy, to carry generally greater value. This is sort of an element of human psychology, where we value things that we've had to work harder to get.
- Sales outreach to the folks who did access it may be much easier and much more effective because you obviously have a lot of information about those people, versus if you collected only an email or no information at all, in which case would be close to impossible.
Drawbacks of gating content
Let's walk through the drawbacks of gating, some things that you can't do:
- Smaller audience potential. It is much harder to get this in front of tons of people. Maybe not this page specifically, but certainly it's hard to get amplification of this, and it's very hard to get an audience, get many, many people to fill out all those form fields.
- Harder to earn links and amplification. People generally do not link to content like this. By the way, the people who do link to and socially amplify stuff like this usually do it with the actual file. So what they'll do is they'll look for State of AI 2016, filetype:pdf, site:yourdomain.com, and then they'll find the file behind whatever you've got. I know there are some ways to gate that even such that no one can access it, but it's a real pain.
- It also is true that some folks this leaves a very bad taste in their mouth. They have a negative brand perception around it. Now negative brand perception could be around having to fill this out. It could be around whether the content was worth it after they filled this out. It could be about the outreach that happens to them after they filled this out and their interest in getting this data was not to start a sales conversation. You also lose a bunch of your SEO benefits, because you don't get the links, you don't get the engagement. If you do rank for this, it tends to be the case that your bounce rate is very high, much higher than other people who might rank for things like the state of AI 2016. So you just struggle.
Benefits of open access
What are the benefits and drawbacks of open access? Well, benefits, pretty obvious:
- Greater ability to drive traffic from all channels, of course — social, search, word of mouth, email, whatever it is. You can drive a lot more people here.
- There's a larger future audience for retargeting and remarketing. So the people who do reach the report itself in here, you certainly have an opportunity. You could retarget and remarket to them. You could also reach out to them directly. Maybe you could retarget and remarket to people who've reached this page but didn't fill in any information. But these folks here are a much greater audience potential for those retargeting and remarketing efforts. Larry Kim from WordStream has shown some awesome examples. Marty Weintraub from Aimclear also has shown some awesome examples of how you can do that retargeting and remarketing to folks who've reached content.
- SEO benefits via links that point to these pages, via engagement metrics, via their ranking ability, etc. etc. You're going to do much better with this. We do much better with the Beginner's Guide to SEO on Moz than we would if it were gated and you had to give us your information first, of course.
Overall, if what you are trying to achieve is, rather than leads, simply to get your message to the greatest number of people, this is a far, far better effort. This is likely to reach a much bigger audience, and that message will therefore reach that much larger audience.
Drawbacks of open access
There are some drawbacks for this open access model. It's not without them.
- It might be hard or even totally impossible to convert many or most of the visits that come to open access content into leads or potential leads. It's just the case that those people are going to consume that content, but they may never give you information that will allow you to follow up or reach out to them.
- Information about the most valuable and important visitors, the ones who would have filled this thing out and would have been great leads is lost forever when you open up the content. You just can't capture those folks. You're not going to get their information.
So these two are what drive many folks up to this model and certainly the benefits of the gated content model as well.
Recommendations
So, my recommendations. It's a fairly simple equation. I urge you to think about this equation from as broad a strategic perspective and then a tactical accomplishment perspective as you possibly can.
1. If audience size, reach, and future marketing benefits are greater than detailed leads as a metric or as a value, then you should go open access. If the reverse is true, if detailed leads are more valuable to you than the audience size, the potential reach, the amplification and link benefits, and all the future marketing benefits that come from those things, the ranking benefits and SEO benefits, if that's the case, then you should go with a gated model. You get lots of people at an open access model. You get one person, but you know all their information in a gated content model.
2. It is not the case that this has to be completely either/or. There are modified ways to do both of these tactics in combination and concert. In fact, that can be potentially quite advantageous.
So a semi-gated model is something we've seen a few content marketers and companies start to do, where they have a part of the report or some of the most interesting aspects of the report or several of the graphics or an embedded SlideShare or whatever it is, and then you can get more of the report by filling in more items. So they're sharing some stuff, which can potentially attract engagement and links and more amplification, and use in all sorts of places and press, and blog posts and all that kind of stuff. But then they also get the benefit of some people filling out whatever form information is critical in order to get more of that data if they're very interested. I like this tease model a lot. I think that can work really, really well, especially if you are giving enough to prove your value and worth, and to earn those engagement and links, before you ask for a lot more.
You can go the other way and go a completely open model but with add-ons. So, for example, in this, here's the full report on AI. If you would like more information, we conducted a survey with AI practitioners or companies utilizing AI. If you'd like the results of that survey, you can get that, and that's in the sidebar or as a little notification in the report, a call to action. So that's full report, but if you want this other thing that maybe is useful to some of the folks who best fit the interested in this data and also potentially interested in our product or service, or whatever we're trying to get leads for, then you can optionally put your information in.
I like both of these. They sort of straddle that line.
3. No matter which one or which modified version you do, you should try and optimize the outcomes. That means in an open content model:
- Don't ignore the fact that you can still do retargeting to all the people who visited this open content and get them back to your website, on to potentially a very relevant offer that has a high conversion rate and where you can do CRO testing and those kinds of things. That is completely reasonable and something that many, many folks do, Moz included. We do a lot of remarketing around the web.
- You can drive low-cost, paid traffic to the content that gets the most shares in order to bump it up and earn more amplification, earn more traffic to it, which then gives you a broader audience to retarget to or a broader audience to put your CTA in front of.
- If you are going to go completely gated, a lot of these form fields, you can infer or use software to get and therefore get a higher conversion rate. So for example, I'm asking for name, email, role, company, website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In fact, I could ask exclusively for LinkedIn and email and get every single one of those from just those two fields. I could even kill email and ask them to sign in with LinkedIn and then request the email permission after or as part of that request. So there are options here. You can also ask for name and email, and then use a software service like FullContact's API and get all of the data around the company, website, role and title, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. that are associated with that name or in that email address. So then you don't have to ask for so much information.
- You can try putting your teaser content in multiple channels and platforms to maximize its exposure so that you drive more people to this get more. If you're worried that hey this teaser won't reach enough people to be able to get more of those folks here, you can amplify that through putting it on SlideShare or republishing on places like Medium or submitting the content in guest contributions to other websites in legit ways that have overlapped audiences and share your information that you know is going to resonate and will make them want more. Now you get more traffic back to these pages, and now I can convert more of those folks to the get more system.
So content gating, not the end of the world, not the worst thing in the world. I personally dislike a lot of things about it, but it does have its uses. I think if you're smart, if you play around with some of these tactical tips, you can get some great value from it.
I look forward to your ideas, suggestions, and experiences with content gating, and we'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Hey Rand, you explained it very clearly by showing the advantages and disadvantages. Now, I guess it’s very clear to everyone using gating content is actually helpful or not. Being as a user, I really hate content gating and it’s a bitter truth that customer experience is most important thing than any other else in today’s business for sure.
I feel that content gating is suitable in a situation where one is so sure that his/her content is so valuable that will make everyone compel to exchange their personal contact info. But what I believe is it’s better not to hide your content beside any kind of form, because if you will share it away then it will be seen and shared by many and reached to the real customers.
And in last, one thing I want to asked you Rand is what you think about signup box that appears suddenly and just irritate us by wasting our time.
Nice WBF. We've found gated content is a much better way to generate leads, if you've got the budget to push people to your content. The main problem is you've got to create a really targeted piece of content which is relevant to the product/service. If you don't, you can find you get a lot of email addresses from people who have no interest in what you're actually trying to sell. Blending has worked particularly well for us in terms of taking parts for teasing out via PR, webinars, 3rd part content. Once the gated content has been live for a while and you're confident you've gone out to a large chunk of the audience, you can always then open up the content and get all the SEO benefits and move onto a new piece of content.
Your approach makes the most sense to me. It's kind of like the model with movie theaters. When someone is BRAND NEW, people will pay $15+ to go see it in theaters. After a few years its on free cable, and the movie owners hope to get some money from ads.
Switching years to months, the SEO White Paper industry seems almost identical.
A variant i like is a combined model with Open Access to the web-content and gating supplemental content.
So your "Report of the state of AI 2016" is a completely open webpage,
and if the user really reads it all the way to the end he will find a form to get the Whitepaper "Using AI in SMBs" as an PDF.
This way you can combine most of the benefits of both approaches. You reach only engaged users who really read your article. You have open content for SEO-Benefits. And you can generate valuable leads.
Also it is always important to remember that every form field you add, increases your abortion rate. So it can me a good strategy to only ask for an E-Mail-Address and nothing else, to get the most possible leads.
Some ways of lead generation, like the linkedin login, might not work for some customer groups or for international customers. (e.g. in Germany linkedin is not a thing) So always keep in mind who you are trying to reach.
As much as I hate gated content as a user, it really works great from a marketing perspective.
Do you think you should target a specific audience with specific content or is it better to make the top of the funnel as wide as possible? You said that for borader audience it is better to go open access, but is there a way to benefit from a closed content for a broad audience?
Igor, I should try to wide the funnel, only if you have a really, really big brand with tons of relevance you can make specific content por specific audience, but it's only my opinion ;)
Agree.
"Is there a way to benefit from a closed content for a broad audience?" - Probably not, simply because this question doesn't consider what's most important to humans on the web: Time.
'Closed content' by nature requires a visitor to perform an additional action in order to get what they want. This extra step means you are taking up more of that visitor's time. Those who are willing to invest in that extra time to get the gated content are likely the only visitors who will find the content most relevant.
If this is the case, then there is no point in marketing it to a broad audience. All you will be doing is wasting the time of visitors who are not passionate enough to take extra steps. While your traffic numbers will be up, so will your bounces from the page and the number of people you've annoyed.
Don't waste people's time by marketing to broad audiences who will not jump through your hoops. It is much more cost effective and better for your brand to really tailor and target your gated assets to a niche audience who will find it most valuable.
I agree with you. Gated content only has sense with faithful audience that don't mind to spend time giving their email to you. Targetting to a broad audience will not be effective if they are not really interested.
This is a very interesting post and recently I have been marketing for clients where the gated model works well, but only due to the fact that their leads they want are very specific. One of the biggest hurdles is to narrow the form fields enough to give the client what they need for the lead, but not to require every piece of information for the client.
I think that the biggest challenge is to provide a result that is worth while in terms of the PDF or report. There is nothing like running into gated content then having to give all your information for a 1-5 plan list of beneficial information.
My ending solution is create something awesome on the other side of the gate so when the user gives you what you want they get a vaulable piece of content.
Great piece and WBF which always normal from Rand da Man!
Great point I think that when I have expeirienced this and then the result is lack luster you automoatically regret giving that information.
Hello Rand,
What I find from just watching your video is that if someone who is giving good information uses content Gating just like you start using Content Gating, most of the readers will engage in it because visitors or readers now a days are smart and they want everything they need to get their minds feed by knowledge. So Thank you for this information today.
Hi Rand,
First, I Loved your shirt !!
A great post again, thanks for sharing Moz's content gating strategy and that would really be helpful for us where or whether to implement it for our own content.
The most important part about the post is identifying WHO filled in the report, and then how they filled it. Once, we have understood the who is willing to fill Gating report then it's easier to fine-tuning gating strategy.
Regards,
Vijay
Thanks for sharing this, Rand. Your recommendations on using gated content are impressive. I’ve found that gated content is useful for specific journal articles and research papers. This is where the audience is researchers and large-scale research organizations. Quoting papers is a win-win for both the journal and the researcher.
Hi Rand!! As every WBF nice information! I really appreciate the different kind of models of content gating. As you said, is not the same content if you want to make leads or to make people to meet you. By the way, I think that we have to be very careful with the information we are giving free to the people that reach us. For example, the information in LinkedIn is special for jobs, but we have to be careful of adding some personal data, for example, telephones, home addresses, etc. By the way Rand, in the drawbacks you say that a disadvantage is that too much people data will be lost. I think that a way to improve this is to sending them to a landing page, then maybe giving 'em a little price like an E-Book and that way we could have their data.
Rand, I see that you put your soul in these kinds of works! Since May 2016 I know you and I feel a great admiration for you. Definitely you're Moz's soul.
Hi Rand,
Great WBF!! I have many B2B clients and often get into this discussion of open vs closed. In your recommendations you state if audience size, reach, and marketing benefits are more important than detailed leads, move to an open access approach. I would add one more to that....brand building/positioning. For example, if a B2B business wishes to be perceived as a thought leader in their field they need to be able to get their thoughts and opinions out to market as effectively and efficiently as possible.
In my experience, those organisations who move to a closed gated approach are those who struggle to create good content. They build one or two good pieces of work (or they pay for a third party to build the content) and try to get as much value out of it as possible and think a closed approach will achieve that. I am not saying that's wrong, but it's a trend I have seen over the years.
Thanks again, I always look forward to WBF's.
Greg
This is a very timely post for me, as we were just discussing implementing this on our site. We've got some really great long-form content that would be a great lead-capture opportunity. There are some reservations about it and if we do it, how to best implement it while getting the best of both worlds. My proposal was to play both sides of the fence by keeping some teaser content in place for organic visibility, but gating the juicy stuff in order to capture leads. This WBF will be helpful to our team in making our case, so thanks for this perfectly timed topic!
Is great article, thank you very much for publishing.
thanks for the mention, rand.
Hello Rand,
This is really awesome and helpful article. But, I'm looking for something related to email marketing {email examples}, I want to sell my product and services. I think though a perfect email marketing strategy, I can be able to grow up my revenue and boost my sale.
Hope you understand!
It would be great if you will share some links!
Cheers!
In my opinion, you should avoid gated content as much as possible for blog posts and or web pages - This is because the main aim is to get more exposure as well as links to your website, unless of course your aim is to get paid for allowing access to the content ( like many newspapers)
For signups etc. it is better that you offer a ebook or something like that
Love the concept of the hybrid model - very cool. Michael Brenner is a big "no gate" man... I think it depends on the desired outcome and goal of the org. With my former role, it was all about getting leads (a manufacturing company). Thanks for sharing, Rand!
I think the two strategies are compatible and is best used in tandem. On the one hand you make content open to the public, and occasionally closed for subscribers create content. So I have seen several blog and this strategy works for them.
Back to the cool shirts!! yeah!! Very interesting information. I believe - as you pointed - you can always find the most accurate mix for your content marketing strategy and also always measure and keep an eye on your KPI's so that you can change the features of the landing pages!
thanks again for the info ;)
David
Two important considerations (among many others) are what resources your company has available to create content and the area your product is in. If resources are very limited and you only have a few items to give away, it may be better to gate that content to make the most of it. If there's not much info out there in your product area, it is probably worthwhile to utilize the model of some gated and some free content in combination with marketing automation.
Thanks for sharing. I have been using the add-on/benefit model you talked about. Since most of my visitors come from search engines, I give them all the value and information about the topics they were searching for. In addition, I offer them a checklist or the PDF version of the article in exchange for their details. That ways, they don't lose out if they don't get the gated content.
Content Gating ! Now that is a new word for my technical dictionary :)
Great WBF Rand! See you at Inbound I'm already signed up for your session!
It depends on the type of audience you are targeting. Content gating will work for the audience who are in the top of the funnel and i would suggest open access with the add on's (CTA in the side bar) for the Middle and Bottom of the funnel audience (It also depends on what kind of content you have).
Thank you, Mr. Fishkin. This is super helpful. One question: do you think less invasive pop-ups (content upgrades) can have similar effects as the ones that take over the whole screen? I want to preserve the best user experiences possible, especially because I am walking a thin line by housing content for current clients and also for prospects all in the same space.
Awesome Whiteboard, Rand! I shared it with the team I am on because a lot of our conversion points and SEM landing pages are gated content pages. Like many, we run into the problem with getting enough people to convert and we end up spending a lot for just a little in return. I absolutely love the idea of overlapping, especially since we haven't tried it yet, and it lessens the risk of the user having as sour of a taste in their mouth if everything was completely gated.
Thanks for yet another Great WBF, Rand!
Adding a small Knowledge guide / Tip & Trick PDF / E-book, may improve overall conversions!
As always, it's a pleasure to watch and read.
I do both. I use blog for less specific information, it allows me to earn all the benefits of backlinks and SEO, and publicity. And I also offer a technical documentation with gated access, just because I need to get leads if I don't want to be fired :) Ah, and it brings business :P
So, I would say combination of two is the best.
Fantastic post as always Rand. Would I be a downer if I mentioned the title of the video says 'Put Your Content Behaind and Email/Form Capture?' A tired Friday at the Moz office? :)
- Matthew de Noronha
Whoops! Great catch :) We'll get that fixed ASAP. Thanks so much, Matthew!
It was a great content, thanks gor sharing. What do you think about Digital Marketer's model of content marketing? They look at it a little bit different.
One point that Rand didn't completely flesh out is who responds better to gated content. B2B audiences would likely have a better hit rate than a B2C audience simply because people are more wary about giving out their private email than they are their business email. Rand's recommended retargeting non-gated assets is a brilliant way to drive conversions for B2C without making the person give up their personal details.
Amazing post!!
Hi Rand,
Interesting WBF, though I think you have looked at only a very specific, narrow case of a gated content, the one that only requires filling in some form with personal information. I think a much broader case of gated content is the paid membership-only content. Most of the valuable information and useful services in the Internet nowadays are behind exactly such gates, including the MOZ website.
This is a really helpful post - we have a lot of clients who are hesitant to gate content because they feel viewers would get more out of their content if it remained ungated. Recently, however, they've been interested in getting more leads via SEO projects, so we've recommended using gated content occasionally to collect e-mail addresses. This post really helped to smooth out any concerns we had with using this strategy - thanks Rand!
This is Truly a very interesting post, just Amazing
That's amazing
wow! Very good post, it gave me a couple of good ideas for my website! Thank you!